Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a weekly columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect. He also writes for the Plum Line blog at The Washington Post and The Week and is the author of Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.

Recent Articles

AP Photo/Evan Vucci Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House I t's getting hard out there for a Trump staffer. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who made the interesting choice to go out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant at the moment her department was separating thousands of children from their parents at our border with Mexico, found herself heckled by protesters shouting "Shame!" Politico reports that "Staffers leaving the White House grounds semi-regularly catch passersby flipping them the bird," and the young ones looking for love on dating apps find that when prospective partners find out who they work for they're regularly rejected, with some colorful insults thrown in. And last Friday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted this on Twitter: Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far...

AP Photo/Chuck Burton President Donald Trump speaks with Pastor Franklin Graham in March. Graham is one of several conservative religious leaders to criticize the administration's family separation policy. W hen it comes to public policy, Donald Trump doesn't believe in very much. He has little in the way of strong feelings about abortion or guns or health care, for instance, though he understands that staying consistent with Republican orthodoxy is politically important for him. But there are a few issues he cares deeply about, and has since before he became a politician. Trade is one of them; he thinks that whenever an American buys something made in another country, the country has been made to look the fool and the world is laughing at us . The other major issue on which Trump has firm beliefs is immigration, and now we are truly seeing those beliefs put into practice, and the result is one of the more intense controversies of this presidency. After a lengthy internal argument in...

(AP Photo/Luca Bruno) Donald Trump in Italy on May 27, 2017 " You are a king," Donald Trump's father reportedly told him . And the thing about being a king is that nobody gets to tell you what to do. It's becoming clear that few parts of the president's character are as important as how harshly he reacts to any attempt to constrain him. He grew up in wealth, and without any sense of obligation to anyone. As the head of a private company, he had no board of directors overseeing him and no one to answer to. And today, the very idea that someone might try to push him in one direction or another—let alone force him to do something like testify before a grand jury or reveal his tax returns—seems to fill him with rage. Seldom has a leader mattered more as an individual, divorced from institutional imperatives, party commitments, international alliances, traditional norms, and historical forces. Indeed, that was part of the appeal Trump made to voters, and the thing that made many in his...

(Chip Somodevilla/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images) President Trump walks across the South Lawn before departing the White House on June 1, 2018. O n July 27, 1974, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, saying that he had "prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice." Nixon resigned before the full House could vote on his impeachment. Twenty-five years later, after an investigation that had begun more than five years before, the United States Senate voted on articles of impeachment for President Bill Clinton, which used the same language, that he had "prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice." Of the 55 Republicans then in the Senate, 50 voted to convict Clinton on this charge; among them were ten who are still in office today. Six Republicans who were then in the House and voted for impeachment are now in the Senate. Also voting for impeachment on the charges including obstruction was then-...

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais President Donald Trump stops to look at supporters at a rally in Washington, Michigan I f you're a Republican, the last two years have asked a lot of you. First you were given an extraordinarily difficult choice: Support Donald Trump, or turn your back on your party. And now, Trump himself is demanding something even more distasteful. If you support him, you must not merely hold your nose and say "The alternative is worse." You must accept an increasingly rancid collection of ideas, ones that require you not only to abandon any commitment at all to honesty but to cast aside much of your dwindling stock of moral values. Let's remind ourselves of the bargain so many Republicans made back in 2016. While Trump's avid supporters made up at least a plurality of the party during the primaries, once he became the nominee, many analysts thought that he'd be unable to bring the rest of the party to him and command the kind of loyalty that had come to mark our...